John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

“All is vanity.” So the Preacher tells us — and some three thousand years later, the question still remains undecided how we are to react to those words.

On a simple level, the past few centuries have established conclusively that all is vain in the etymological sense — all is void of greater meaning. And many pseudointellectuals prattle on proudly about this absence of meaning as a justification for hedonism and all other sorts of self-indulgence — and they take their “scientific” nihilism as a sign of profundity, having failed to realize that the scientific confirmation of the absence of purpose in the universe (or meaning, which is far less to ask for) is not the solution to the problem Ecclesiastes posed, but a deepening of it. Nihilism as a solution to our teleological questioning is like the application of leeches to cure infection: the wound is only deepened rather than healed.

The problem cannot be solved by proclaiming that “all is vanity” and leaving it at that because we are alive — and living is the perpetual evaluation of all around us. Unjust, self-centered and near-sighted as we may be, we must make judgments, we must find what is meaningful.

A good life involves the perpetual reconsideration of this problem — but problem not like a problem of mathematics that admits of a final solution, but as being a musician is a problem, a perpetual striving towards an unattainable goal that is approached ever closer — aproached as the limit of some infinite process.

One finds in the ugly a hatred of beauty as a means of placing others beneath one. Might not the hatred of rhetoric stem from a similar cause in those who lack subtle ears — and subtler mouths?

After, you don’t find the opposite sex attractive, you just want to fuck metal.¹

1. Rachel Elizabeth de Bernardo↩

If I had that much money, I would have a cape made out of human flesh.¹

1. Phillip Jonathan Briar↩

How wonderful life is! Even the sources of suffering can bring pleasure and excitement — one is driven to explore them, to understand, to learn how to predict them so as to avoid them later — or not avoid them, as the case may be.

But how cruel it can be as well: one is driven to treat others with distrust by seeing the signs and patterns of behavior of those untrustworthy in new acquiantances. One learns to treat others as disposable commodities when one knows one will be treated in the same way. One learns coldness out of necessity.

How many human beings treat other human beings only as toys? This is a trait I’ve found mostly in women, who sincerely enjoy and care for their toys — but discard them without thought of consequence when the toy no longer amuses. One of great miseries is to be treated as a toy to be taken up when playtime has come and discarded again afterwards without compassion or sympathy — and often without any profound reasons.

And how many human beings treat others as tools? This is a trait I’ve found mostly in men, especially in radical leftists who tend to treat the common people as tools for creating their vision of a world that would be better for the common people — all without asking the common people their opinion even once on the matter. They are not even as honest as true tyrants: tyrants say, “I will tell you what to want.” The anarchist says, “I know what you really want and you do not.” Better honest oppression than feigned benevolence — than self-absorption given the name of charity.

Amid all of the things one finds in life, though, there resounds the single theme, “life is beautiful.”

Freude, schoener Goetterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.¹

The quality of a man is, I think, perhaps directly proportional to his ability to see life as beautiful, to feel wonder and awe, to stand before the universe and to be happy in that moment. I do not ask for gratitude, praise or even contentment. Momentary happiness is better than lasting contentment. All that is needed is to the capacity to be happy — not to feel pleasure, but to be happy, which is nearly unrelated. Many, out of an inability to be happy, constantly seek out pleasure to forget the absence of moments of happiness.

Pleasure is an animal quality based on the senses and little more if any more at all. True happiness is the sense that the world is right, is as it should be — even if only in this one spot, only for this one moment. By necessity, such happiness is ephemeral, but it provides the pause in life that is the fount of all that is good in man I suspect.

1. Friedrich Schiller : Ode To Joy : Lines 1-4↩

Being silent is something one completely unlearns if, like him, one has been for so long a solitary mole —¹

1. Friedrich Nietzsche : The Dawn : Preface↩

Nothing that breathes is above betrayal.¹

1. Shai Hulud : Demos 2006 : Blades↩

The attacks of the liberal left are generally ignorant nonsense and probably more responsible for the successes of the right than the efforts of the right itself. The blaming of corporation is little different from blaming of communists and comparably overbroad. The real origin of injustice is simple — single, selfish people are the problem. It is human nature that is broken and not human institutions. There is no idea humans will not corrupt. What must be changed is humanity.

The second you start being unhappy, I’l say “get out of here and get one of your happy friends to stick her ass in my face.”¹

1. Harry Mazzio : Conversation About Cafe Risque↩

This is a test of the emergency Sidekick broadcast system. It is only a test.